Top Distractions At Work

What is it that keeps you glued to your work station? We are very sure it’s not the pile of work as high as the Empire State building.

But we won’t be surprised if you say the Facebook page of your hot neighbor. As much as being asocial can harm your well-being, turning overtly social won’t take you far either in your professional ladder. Just because we turn up at work every morning like a robot doesn’t mean we “work”. There are a million distractions that keep us away from being productive, leading to an unsatisfied professional life. These distractions keep us from focusing on the job at hand and force us to make errors. Read on to eliminate these distractions:

Cell Phones

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Cell phones are a bane in disguise. Do you constantly keep looking at your phone to see if you have received a text or missed someone’s call? When you send and receive texts or speak on the phone with someone, it keeps us away from our desks for long. These days, apps like Whatsapp have only compounded the issue. Keep your phone on silent—that’s only asking to maintain office decorum and keep it away from your sight.

Social Networking Sites

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Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook make us highly unproductive. We are always online looking at friend’s pictures or commenting on their status messages, or ranting about how good or bad we feel. Twitter with its continuous feed is also highly addictive. Now you can also watch embedded videos on these platforms. Advancing technology also equals lesser concentration.

Emails

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Email services like Gmail, Yahoo or Rediff, are also equally time consuming. We see an incoming email and immediately sidetrack the job on hand and check who the email is from and go about responding to it. As long as you are not required to check mails on these sites for official purposes, keep Gmail time limited to home.

Chatting

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Chatting applications from Facebook and Gmail are very distracting. We spend a lot of time chatting, thinking we can multitask, but it is becomes impossible because we get drawn into the conversation before we even realize it. Instant messaging is an addiction that can even take your life. Don’t believe us? There are reports of people dying of road accidents while crossing the road and chatting on the phone.

Tea/Coffee Breaks

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Well, we aren’t asking you to be table-chair junkies and not lift your head even for a minute. But tea and coffee breaks at cafeterias are also equally responsible for not letting us do our jobs. People spend a lot of time while taking these breaks. If the cafeteria has a game room with carom, and pool or a TT table, these breaks get even longer. Sometimes they end up taking breaks so that they can play a game or two. Or an occasional coffee and cigarette break turns into a long tete-a-tete.

Talkative Colleagues

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Even colleagues who are constantly chattering can prevent us from focusing. They are either on the phone, or talking among themselves, mostly loudly, or taking client calls in the middle of the working space disturbing everyone around them.

Snacking

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At times some colleague gets some snacks from home and one thing leads to another and before you know it, you have spend the entire afternoon discussing recipes or anecdotes.

Personal Issues

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Often personal issues also come between us and our work. We have a home loan to think about perhaps, or the education of your child, or fight with a friend or some other personal problem. Whatever it is, thinking about it at work is not advisable.

Music

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People bring headphones to work and spend the entire day fine tuning their playlist. They might think music helps them focus, but it is the other way around. It doesn’t. It disturbs more than you would think.

It’s alright to take a break or two. It is okay to even share a joke with your colleagues. But you should ensure it doesn’t come in between you and your work. We should perhaps restrict our personal entertainment needs to at the most an hour, and rest of the time should be completely dedicated to our work. This will not only make us more productive, but will also give us a sense a satisfaction of having contributed towards the growth of our company.